Abstract
ABSTRACTScholars have suggested that public memory often reflects more about the present than it does about the past. This article takes up the issue of how public commemoration of Jack Johnson has rhetorically repositioned him as a central figure in the fight for civil rights, despite Johnson's well-documented reservations about acting as a representative for the Black community. Public commemoration is a practice of “rhetorical invention” (Blair, Dickinson, & Ott, 2010, p. 13; Blair & Michel, 2000). The rhetorical invention of Johnson's legacy is conditioned by the material (historical, social, and cultural) contexts in which his memory is evoked in public discourse and is comprised of visual and discursive strategies used by those who sought to commemorate him. In commemoration, Johnson's body is inscripted as a “raced figure” to signify conceptual shifts in Black masculinities and the tactical dimensions of the Civil Rights Movement. By examining the rhetorical invention of Johnson's legacy, this article makes beginning propositions about the tenuous relationship between public memory and race.
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